[No Root] How To Hide The Navigation Bar in Huawei’s EMUI 5.0

The latest Huawei’s flagship smartphone, The Huawei Mate 9 comes with a large 6.0″ screen that normally makes it difficult to use with one hand. But Huawei took care of this by implementing a one-handed mode.

It makes it pretty easy to shrink the screen so you can reach all the UI elements easy with one hand but they haven’t provided a way to do the opposite thing. There are people who want to use the big screen and take all the advantages it offers.

Huawei even obliges you by offering a floating dock feature with all the standard navigation keys. But you may want to hide the navigation bar when the floating dock is activated. So in this article, I’m going to show you a way how to hide Navigation Bar in Huawei’s EMUI 5.0 without Root access.

If you have been playing with Android for a while probably you have heard about build.prop edit. You can hide the Navigation Bar in EMUI 5.0 simply by adding a piece of code at the end of build.prop file. You can do it by adding the code below:

qemu.hw.mainkeys=1

This is an old trick and it works pretty well but it requires root access to edit the file. But if you do not have root access there is another simple trick that hides only the navigation bar on Huawei’s EMUI 5.0. It doesn’t require anything just a computer and few files to install. No build.prop edit or anything else that can be complicated. By implementing this method you will have the status bar shown but you must use any other navigation method, for example, Huawei’s floating dock.

How to remove the Navigation Bar in Huawei’s EMUI 5.0

To hide Huawei’s Navigation Bar all you need is a computer with ADB binaries installed and the proper USB drivers. Once you configured ADB drivers you should enable USB Debugging under Developer Options. Go to Settings > About Phone > Build Number. Tap 7 times on it and a message should appear “Now you are a developer”.

Go again to Settings > Developer Options > USB Debugging. Connect your phone to the computer using USB cable. Make sure the computer recognizes the phone and then run the following code:

adb shell settings put global navigationbar_is_min 1

Reboot the phone and when it is turned on you will see that the navigation bar will be completely hidden. Without a navigation bar, you can use third-party applications or even Huawei’s floating dock to use the phone.